“I want to know them well, intimately. I have to be able to describe them.” ~The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume One

Do you feel self-conscious when you are writing sex scenes in novels? Does your love poetry lack lust(re)? The goal of this course is to find a vocabulary for the erotic self; writers will explore ways of describing their characters’ lives fully and unselfconsciously, to enhance the story or poem at hand. Exploring your sensual self can be exciting, freeing. How much is too much sex; how much is not enough? By incorporating just the right amount of eroticism into your writing you will add a level of depth and authenticity to your writing. Continue reading →

Join Tightrope Books at Proof, the Vodka Bar in the Intercontinental Hotel from 3 – 6 pm to launch new books by Jim Nason and Ruth Roach Pierson.

Jim Nason’s collection of shorts stories is entitled The Girl on the Escalator. The characters in theses eleven stories live in a world upside down. From the young professional who leaves her high-powered job to explore street life as a graffiti artist, to the gay man who falls in love… with a woman. Jim Nason has crafted a collection of gender- and expectation-bending stories that reveal the extraordinary and often heartbreaking truths of ordinary life.

Also being launched will be Ruth Roach Pierson’s third poetry collection, Contrary. While humour, fond remembrance, and wry awareness break through, contrariness tinges many of the poems in this collection, a contrariness rooted in rueful self-examination. These are poems that mount an opposition, poems that contradict and argue, sometimes in jest, sometimes in deadly seriousness, poems that read unexpected messages into painting and photographs.

Ruth Roach Pierson will be reading from Contrary, her newly published book of poems, in the Pivot Readings series at the Press Club, 850 Dundas Street West, on Wednesday, March 23, starting at 8:00 p.m.